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Comment by cwkoss | Hacker News Reader

Yes, bad idea. Significant moral hazard. You'll be tasked with implementing dark patterns in social malware that, despite all the recent criticism, is being used benignly for the most part today.

How would you feel if you knew your work started being used by authoritarian regimes to oppress their citizens speech and ability to organize?

How confident are you that Facebook wouldn't take that opportunity if it was presented to them? Same question, but what if FB's user numbers and usage have declined for a couple years and they are desperately trying to monetize any lingering network effects they can?

They currently have a friendly panopticon. Only the morals of their leadership and PR concerns are holding them back from changing the friendliness.

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> You'll be tasked with implementing dark patterns

Facebook is a large company, and there are other ways to make a difference or learn skills you can take elsewhere. For example, their teams in DC are working on the problems that people often criticize them about. Things like misinformation, foreign interference, security, public safety, etc.

I wish more people understood this. Were there bad people at FB while I was there? Yes. Did bad things happen? Also yes. On the other hand, I also saw good people and good things. I saw massive and frankly very disruptive efforts around privacy and data retention. I saw people fired for violating very stringent rules about handling of user data. I saw a quite-large company's worth of people and resources devoted to detecting harmful or inauthentic content. I couldn't see the content itself (see previous about rules) but from where I sat in the storage org I could see the names of the processing pipelines and know their scope. Maybe those aren't enough to outweigh the negatives, but to ignore the very existence of those people and those efforts does not IMO make for responsible or useful commentary.

How would you feel if you knew your work started being used by authoritarian regimes to oppress their citizens speech and ability to organize?

I may be speaking out of ignorance, but do you have an example of this occurring or are you speaking purely hypothetically?

Hypothetically. Facebook has the capability to be turned into a very evil tool cheaply: they essentially have a surveillance apparatus for a large amount of online activity and history of demonstrating willing to implement features that are user-hostile dark patterns or mislead users about their privacy. I would never want to work there because I don't trust leadership to not pivot into something more Orwellian if their social network has a myspace-style migration and collapse.

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